Kamala Harris: Joe Biden’s Impeachment Insurance
A new poll indicates strong bipartisan concern about the vice president’s readiness to lead.
It seems like only yesterday when we wrote a story about a recent poll and said, “Pollsters should be viewed with great suspicion.” So, naturally, today we figured we’d write another story about a recent poll that reveals a critical truth.
This poll is important because it concerns the future of the republic and the future of the politician who many believed would one day soon be running it: Kamala Harris.
A survey by the Trafalgar Group — whom RealClearPolitics called “the most accurate pollster of the cycle among those firms that polled multiple Senate and governor races” — found that 58.6% of respondents were “not confident at all” that Harris is ready to be president “based on her performance as vice president.” An additional 5% said they were “not very confident” in Harris, which means nearly two-thirds of the 1,161 likely voters polled had significant concerns about her readiness.
Perhaps most remarkable about Harris’s tanking numbers, though, is her standing among Democrats. According to Trafalgar, 42.6% of those in her own party were either “not at all confident” or “not very confident” in Harris’s preparedness, while 52.3% were “very confident” or “somewhat confident.”
These numbers are damning to both Harris and the man who picked her — after all, her selection was the first test of Joe Biden’s judgment. Harris is a heartbeat away from the presidency, and her boss is the most cognitively challenged chief executive since the stroke-addled Woodrow Wilson served out the final two years of his second term more than a century ago.
There’s a parallel here, too: The gravity of Wilson’s condition was kept from the American people by his physician and his second wife. The gravity of Biden’s condition is being kept from us by his handlers’ continued refusal to subject him to the same cognitive exam that Donald Trump took (and aced) amid demands from his deranged Democrat detractors.
As for Harris, how the mighty have fallen. It seems like eons ago when the then-junior senator from California launched her presidential campaign with a bang on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2019; when she drew more than 20,000 to a rally in her hometown of Oakland. As the lefties at Wikipedia note, “Within 24 hours of the announcement, Harris’s campaign received over $1.5 million in donations from about 38,000 individuals across all fifty states” — an out-of-the-gate performance rivaling that of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 campaign.
But Harris is neither eloquent, nor inspiring, nor transformative. Nor does she believe, as King did, that we should be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character. Instead, she’s a typical race-baiting leftist. Worse, if we’re to believe Politico, she isn’t even particularly likeable. Furthermore, given her frequent missteps, as with her woefully delayed trip to a Texas city a full 800 miles from our nation’s actual border crisis, she doesn’t even appear competent.
As we wrote recently, Harris checked off all the complementary boxes: female to Biden’s male, young to Biden’s old, West Coast to Biden’s East Coast, multiracial to Biden’s racist, normal to Biden’s creepy, sniffable to Biden’s sniffy. Unfortunately for her, there’s a lot more to leadership than checking boxes.
Perhaps Harris’s most glaring weakness is as a retail politician. When she first announced, there were giddy whispers on the Left that she’d be the female Obama — an attractive, mixed-raced Democrat who pulled together that same huge voting coalition. She’s definitely not that. As soon as people learned who Barack Obama (wanted them to think he) was, he drew huge crowds. Harris has done just the opposite.
As political analyst Daniel Greenfield notes: “Kamala is representative of California Democrats who outside the hothouse of their one-party state don’t know how to actually campaign, debate, or do anything except pose for photos. A generation of California Democrats don’t know how to compete because they’ve never had to.”
Think about it: When Barack Obama was president, the joke around the Beltway was that Joe Biden was his “impeachment insurance” — which is to say, anyone foolish enough to try to remove Obama from office would be left with doddering old Biden as president. And here, today, six months into their administration, Harris is so poorly regarded that she’s serving the same sorry purpose that Biden did for Obama.
As Greenfield concludes: “After a long wasted life in politics, Kamala has no religion, no family, and has become the embodiment of the Peter Principle, promoted vastly above her competence, looking at a job that she can almost touch with her manicured hands, but will never be allowed to possess. The most powerful woman in Washington D.C. is actually the weakest.”
Indeed, the presidency is the biggest of offices. And she’s proving herself far too small for it.